Each academic year the School of Arts and Sciences Newark welcomes new faculty to our family from across the liberal arts disciplines. This year’s group is diverse, spanning the social sciences, humanities, arts and physical sciences. Below, we profile a handful of the professors making their SASN debut during spring 2023. (You can revisit colleagues who started in fall 2022 here in Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.)
Juan Arredondo
Assistant Professor | Journalism
Juan Arredondo is a Colombian American documentary photographer and filmmaker who has chronicled human rights and conflict in Latin America. He’s a regular contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic. His photographs have also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, ESPN Magazine, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and others. Since 2014 he has been reporting on the use of child soldiers by illegal armed groups in Colombia, the peace agreement between the Colombian Government and FARC, and the demobilization and reintegration of former fighters into Colombian society, for which he was awarded a World Press Photo award in 2018.
For his work as a journalist, he was also awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2018-2019, an Overseas Press Club Scholar Award, an ICRC Humanitarian Visa D’Or Award, a Getty Grant for Editorial Photography, a Getty Images Emerging Talent Award, and a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award.
Juan has taught ethics, photojournalism, multimedia, sound and video at Columbia University journalism school as an adjunct professor, and at the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass Communication and the University of Arkansas as a visiting professor. He holds a B.A. from Rutgers-New Brunswick and an M.S. in journalism and documentary filmmaking from Columbia University.
“As a Rutgers alumn (RU-NB '01), I can’t think of a more gratifying and humbling experience than to give back to the university and the community that was integral to my formative years,” said Arredondo. “I’m excited to be given this opportunity to come back and be inspired by my students and the work of my colleagues.”
Elizabeth Holly
Assistant Professor | CMBN
Elizabeth Holly is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN) at RU-N. She earned her B.S. in Experimental Psychology from Northern Michigan University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Tufts University. Her doctoral work earned the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association Division 28. Prior to joining RU-N, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her research integrates her broad training in behavioral and systems neuroscience in rodents to explore how the brain makes decisions, and how these neural mechanisms and decisions behaviors are altered by a history of stress. Her current work, funded by an NIH K01 Career Development Award, investigates the effects of adolescent social isolation on adult value-based decisions and underlying neural circuits. By gaining a more mechanistic understanding of how stress impacts the brain and decision-making behaviors, Dr. Holly’s goal is to contribute to the development of improved therapeutic interventions for stress-related disorders.
“I am excited to be joining the outstanding faculty at CMBN and RU-N,” said Dr. Holly. “I am especially eager to see how my research will grow through collaborations in the vibrant Rutgers neuroscience community.”
Edward Fergus
Professor | Urban Education
Edward Fergus is Professor of Urban Education. He started at RU-N in fall 2022 and was unable to participate in our fall roundup of new faculty, and so we wanted to introduce him to the SASN community now.
Prior to joining RU-N, Fergus was Associate Professor of Urban Education and Policy at Temple University and Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at New York University, and Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University (2004-2013). Before entering academia, Fergus was a community schools program director with Children’s Aid Society in NYC and a high school social studies teacher.
Fergus has published more than four dozen articles, book chapters and evaluation reports, and written, co-authored or edited five books, including Skin Color and Identity Formation: Perceptions of Opportunity and Academic Orientation Among Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth (Routledge Press, 2004), Invisible No More: Disenfranchisement of Latino Men and Boys (Routledge Press, 2011), Schooling for Resilience: Improving Trajectory of Black and Latino Boys (Harvard Education Press, 2014), Solving Disproportionality and Achieving Equity (Corwin Press, 2016), and the forthcoming books Boyhood and Masculinity Construction in the U.S. (Routledge Press) and Unpacking the Cultural Shopping Cart: The Cross-Cultural Lives to Challenge School Segregation (Corwin).
Fergus has worked with more than 120 school districts since 2004 on educational equity and school reform, specifically addressing disproportionality in special education and suspension. Fergus partners with state education departments such as those in New Jersey, California, Maryland, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Texas and serves (or has served) on various boards such as NY State Governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, the Yonkers Public Schools Board of Education and the National Center on Learning Disabilities, and has served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division on Educational Opportunities, New York State Attorney General’s Office, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
"RU-N is a place that nurtures the development of equitable school systems through the development of new teachers, veteran teachers and activists,” said Fergus. “It is powerful to be in a space that centers the learning development of communities dealing with inequitable systems.”